New Years In Boullay

With cheer like this, who needed to be in
Paris?

Beyond the Café Zone

Boullay-les-Troux:- Tuesday, 31. December 2002:-
The first thing I did in the early afternoon on Saturday
after arriving here the evening before, was drive back to
Paris to pick up a few items I'd forgotten. I would have
done it in the morning but when you are having fun you may
as well sleep through it.

The quickie round-trip was uneventful except for being
parked on a divided highway on the way to Paris for 25
minutes. The cause of this pause was unapparent. Back in
the 14th I parked illegally around the corner from my
place, ran inside, got the forgotten and used the free
toilet without paying myself 20 cents.

Then, using a secret route known only to a half-million
other Paris drivers, I got quickly out of town and even
managed to do a little sight-seeing in Meudon on the way
back. Seeing where Marie Antoinette's château used to
be always gives me a thrill. It's about where Edith Piaf's
clinic was, in the Bellevue part of Meudon.

Then, I successfully found the extra-big super-gigantic
hypermarché, where one can buy supplies for a
somewhat short stay in outer Essonne, which is the location
of the Web-server lady's world-famous Cadillac Ranch.

On account of the reconnaissance visit to this very same
place last summer, getting supplies took less than a whole
day. The trick was to use a 150-items-or-more checkout line
rather than the ten items-or-less ones, each of which had
lines of 15 customers, every one with exactly 9.5
items.

Finding my way from this commercial centre to
Boullay-les-Troux - famous for its nonexistent 'holes' -
was a snap because the way is by no means direct. The route
is so complicated that it is impossible to forget.

Thus I was set to enjoy my year-end holiday at the
'ranch' with absolutely nothing to do except look
after
the Web-server lady's incoming 250 emails about four times
a day, try to redesign a Web site, eliminate my own 75 spam
emails per day, figure out how to get the DVD player to
change its sound from Arabic to English, and feed the cat,
Tiger.

The last of the blue skies at the ranch.

This last item was number one on the list given to me by
Linda Thalman. The five pages of written instructions said
the cat liked to siesta in the computer room and in the
laundry room, and I wasn't supposed to accidently shut it
up in these places because little Tiger gets hungry often,
and will eat a hard disk or a washing machine, if not
served its favorite gunk 'on time,' which is off-and-on all
day and night.

As it turned out, all the DVDs I tried spoke English.
Except for one, their entertainment value was nearly zero -
so I stopped on three and skipped the other 25 - assuming
that some of them had not improved since last summer.

The Web-server lady had also insisted I take the tour I
didn't try last summer, the one that starts in Chevreuse.
She said I might see wild pigs. Instead of doing this, I
spent 42 minutes each day driving around to all the
surrounding villages, looking for a good thimble of strong
café.

I don't suggest that you try this. There are four places
within 200 metres in the 14th in Paris that have better,
stronger, café. So, on a whim, I decided to visit
Chartres.

Some people think this location would be perfect for
Paris' third airport. Except for its cathedral its
surrounding countryside is pretty flat, which makes runways
easier to build. Never mind that from some angles
the cathedral seems to be floating on a ocean of wheat -
but this is not a sight you will see in winter anyway, so -
why not turn it into an airport?

The town has placed a 350-car parking lot within a short
distance of the cathedral, which dates from the 12th
century. There are 300 steps if you go up one of its
towers, which means there are some surplus parking spaces
for visitors who do not like heights or countless stone
steps.

The nifty cathedral at Chartres has more
windows than steps in its tower.

If you skip the steps entirely you can walk around
inside the cathedral and admire its colorful windows, for
hours - because there are more than a hundred of them. And
each window contains illustrations like the frames of a
comic book, so there are something like glass 1800 images
in all.

Seeing these on a bright day is easier than on a gloomy
one, so while I was there the sun shone. However, the
brochure I picked up at the visitor's bureau mentions that
Chartres has four other churches with colored windows too -
so I walked around the outside of the cathedral to make
sure it has not changed much since the last winter day I
saw it, about 20 years ago.

Chartres itself has been around since before Roman
times, perhaps as a Druid 'metropole,' according tp the
Michelin guide. If I had read this before going there
again, I may have gone sooner. It depends how many other
'metropoles' may be mentioned in the guide, which I am
unlikely to read anyway.

Within a short time - slightly less than the 60
minutes-worth purchased from the parking metre - I had
toured the essential sights as superficially as always, had
my regulation café - Chartres is not well-known for
this drink, for good reason - and with only exceeding by
five minutes the parking ticket's limit, was on my way out
of town.

After the brief sunshine in Chartres, the sky over
northern France decided to finish the year with uniform low
and dark clouds, and some of these sprinkled a little rain
around.

Every time Tiger came in from outside, using its own
private doors, the animal was wet. My pants were always handy for drying off. It never occurred
to me before that certain cats think humans wear cat
towels, but I'm sure they do.

As everybody knows, cats are curious. I was reminded of
this when Tiger gave my left foot a large bite, possibly to
see if the lower part of the towel was live or not. Later
the cat tried to make it up to me later by eating my
sweater with considerable joy, while I was wearing
it.

More Chartres, more drama in the sky.

On a third occasion, while hacking away at the usual 268
emails, Tiger leaped onto my lap. This startled me so much
that I trashed and burnt all the emails I was going to
trash and burn anyway, and escaped from the animal by
standing up. This was not a wise move because it hung
on.

The only other mistake I made was that this was in the
computer room - one of Tiger's no-go areas. Once the cat is
in there, it doesn't go out and get wet, and therefore
needs no people-towels to rub up against, and will stay in
there forever - perhaps eating emails. In the end, it did
not take too many days to coax it out.

I was looking forward to seeing all of New Years Eve
from the comfort of a wide sofa with the aid of a jumbo TV,
so when the time came for the show to begin I had the set
well-warmed up and ready to go.

For the previous two evenings, France-2 TV had been
showing some sort of low-hauler dragging party people up
and down the Champs-Elysées. I thought this was a
rehearsal for the big night, so I didn't watch any of it. I
didn't want the true New Years Eve effect spoiled by
pre-exposure.

France-2 TV called their New Years Eve show 'Les
Vainquereurs de 2002.' The private channel TF1 called their
New Years Eve show '120 Minutes de Bonheur.' Both were very
colorful, with a great number
of long-forgotten invited guest-stars, many forgettable TV
'personalities,' and absolutely no live New Years Eve
coverage whatsoever. Both shows were longer versions of
their usual early evening programming from Sunday to
Saturday.

No 'wild pigs' and not many other people
looking for them.

Meanwhile, 450,000 live people whooped it up on the
Champs- Elysées - and some of this could be seen by
flipping channels over to the satellite link to bring in
remote stations in the Middle-East and Japan, which did
cover the parties in Berlin, London, New York and - in
Paris.

The show was brief on TV because even the satellite
seemed to go to sleep early. I always thought these worked
24 hours a day, but maybe the French version is short of
electricity.

There was, of course, no dancing in the streets of
Boullay-les-Troux. No bangs. No rockets. Frankly, the
weather was too rotten to even look out the windows at the
dark countryside.

But I am not a total nit. The disappointment of not
being able to remotely see Paris' party was offset by
having thoughtfully acquired a suitable and festive New
Years cake, and it turned out to be quite tasty if you like
cakes with cracker bottoms.

New Years Day, with woolly clouds hanging like a shroud
in the treetops, seemed to be a likely day to finally take
the tour along the Chevreuse in the hope of spotting wild
pigs. The Web-server lady insisted I do this.

The path beside the creek is narrow. It goes past old
sheds that were used to keep low clouds off of the tanners
who worked along here. I guess they don't do it
anymore because I didn't
see any beavers. There were some mallards though. They
seemed somewhat bad-mannered when it became clear I hadn't
brought them any cake.

The rest of the day was filled with the usual email
trash, and testing the café in Saint- Rémy's
only open café. The high point of this experience
was that it was the only open café - perhaps in the
entire department.

Chevreuse - rich in local color -
if you like it old and damp.

Another pastime during the stay was visiting all the
surrounding villages, to buy bread. In many places,
boulangeries were the only shops open. So remember, unless
you are allergic to it, you can run out of everything else
in France but there's always fresh bread available.

To make my New Years absolutely complete, I forgot all
about making any good-intentioned resolutions. TV reminded
me of this a day later - with its day-late New Years
programming - when Parisians were asked if they had
resolved to 'do better' in 2003. Nobody said they intended
to become an astronaut.

'Time to go' was carefully planned and co-ordinated by
portable phone - first with a call from the Web-server lady
at Roissy, watching nothing coming out of the baggage
chute, and then by a call from the RER train on its way to
Saint-Rémy.

The warm car and its papers were handed over at the
station in Saint- Rémy about five minutes
after arriving there. The train came in and the Web-server
lady showed me how she'd danced in the New Year until 03:00
across the Karadeniz Bogazi - the Bosporus! - in Turkey's
Asian section, in Usküdar.

From this, for feeding Tiger, she rewarded me with a
tidy surprise box of 'Turkish Delight' - about 102 percent
sugar and other obscure ingredients - slogan, 'Made
exclusively by Opera for the travellers of Istanbul's
Atatürk Airport.'

With this in hand I caught the return RER train to
Denfert and found the café Rendez-Vous to be open,
with its so-so café, but quite a bit better than in
Saint-Rémy, Chevreuse, Cernay-la-Ville, Chartres and
other 'metropoles' located far and wide in Essonne. Ahhh,
café!